Points Of Interest: Banking, Shopping
Banking and shopping is using technology at a growing rate. Banks and shops use may use of technology to help make life easier for not only themselves but the customers as well.
Banking:
For banking the technology can pose a positive and a negative on both sides. Now days there are many facilities in place to enable people to spend money in fact more easier than ever before. An example is credit cards. People can instead of having physical money on them, can pay for goods almost anywhere just using one simple card. ATM (Automated Teller Machine) electronic device that performs basic teller functions, such as accepting deposits, cash withdrawals, and account balance inquiries. Users possessing a card with their desired bank can simply go along to an ATM or also known as a cash machine and complete various transactions as mentioned above.
The use of using credit card in shops in growing as is security.
The “old-fashioned” way of paying using a credit card to pay for good was that all face-to-face credit or debit card transactions used a magnetic stripe or mechanical imprint to read and record account data, and a signature for verification. However numerous government restrictions have been brought in place over the past few years meaning the shops now have to have to use “chip and pin” technology. This means than credit card holders wishing to buy good have to have a pin number for the card and enter it in a small device for the transaction to be complete.
The demand for credit cards is growing even more to cater for shopping online. To purchase goods over the internet most of the time some form of credit card is needed to complete a transaction. At present people need to just enter the credit card number and the transaction is complete. However there are plans in place to offer some sort of online chip and pin technology to help prevent fraud as like what has been done in shops. The future in anti-fraud is also changing thanks to chip and pin. On September 10th 2006, The Times newspaper reported “Online shoppers may get own card terminals to beat fraud”. The report went on to say Under a scheme being developed by the Apacs payment network, bank customers using the internet will be given hand-held terminals that generate a different eight-digit code for each transaction. Customers can only gain access to their online account with this code.
Shopping:
As mentioned above, the whole new “chip and pin” system is appearing in more and more shops and this is becoming the new standard of paying. Another may in which technology has changed shopping as we know it today is for stock control. Using various forms of databases, shops can now gain more accurate information on there present stock. They can find out what in stock, what is low in stock and even set-up a system were it can automatically order stock when supply reaches a certain level. Using this type of system enables shops to keep trading far more and they would rarely run out of stock. But it is the barcode that has really revolutionised shops. Barcodes are machine-readable representation of information in a visual format on a surface. A barcode in basically a code which is divide up into lots of binary (1’s and 0’s). A barcode reader then reads the code and checks it to the stock database.
Once scanned through it various information about the product can appear to the cashier such as the cost of the item. Once paid, the database can pick up that the item has been taken thus -1 less stock.
Another feature for the future of shopping is self check-outs. Across the UK, some major supermarkets are experimenting with check-outs which require no member of staff. This means that the customers scans in their own items and pays for it them selves. This is designed to speed up the customers shopping experience, help reduce queues and the possibility of not having to employ as many staff.